Saturday, December 29, 2012

An inclusive
model of priesthood offers several contribution and challenges in renewing
Eucharistic theology and spirituality. An inclusive model of priesthood means
that all are welcome and included, all are invited to the table. This includes
women, whether single or married, straight or gay. This inclusive priesthood
reflects the communities they serve, which includes LGBT and divorced/remarried
people.

This model
stands in contrast with the Catholic Church as a whole, where many are excluded.
Only males, and single ones at that, are allowed to be priests. The communities
they serve also exclude women who want to be priests, people who are LGBT and
divorced-remarried people. Many of these people still feel themselves to be
faithful Catholics, but for reasons, often not their own choice, they are
excluded from the sacraments. Being a woman is not a choice, being gay is not a
choice. It's who we are, and who we understand ourselves to be. Being divorced
is not always one's own choice. And it's not right to stay in a relationship
that is abusive and unhealthy. Why must these people pay a price for the choices
of others. They should be allowed to remarry and build a healthy life. And they
should be welcome to the eucharistic table as full members of the body of
Christ.

Having an
inclusive model of priesthood offers several contributions to renewing
Eucharistic communities. First of all by having women as priests, we recognize
the whole body of Christ and acknowledge the contributions and insights that
women bring to all the roles of service in Priesthood. It offers insights into
God as having female qualities, as one who brings to birth something new, and as
one who nurtures.

Priests who
are married or have partners, can bring to their ministry insights into
relationships and better understand people who are in relationships. These
relationships give new understandings of our relationship with God. How do we
understand God's love if we have never fallen in love? How do our human
relationships enlighten our relationship with God? How does our relationship
with God enrich our relationships with others?

Many women
priests have had children and this experience stretches us in many ways. (No pun
intended). The whole experience of pregnancy with all the health challenges that
can present, really makes you realize that you have given of yourself, even your
own body so that another might live. It gives new insight into the words of
consecration “This is my body and blood, given for you.” As children grow, they
struggle to understand their own independence. These struggles stretch parents
in their patience, their compassion, their understanding, and their ability to
love even when their child is pushing them away. This helps us understand what
it means to love like God loves us. To love no matter what, without limits, and
never give up. Parent love goes longer than the terrible twos and beyond teenage
rebellion. It never ends. God's love for us never ends either. Even if we think
we don't need God, God is always there, always calling us back, always loving.
Like the wine skins of the gospel, we are shaped by what we bear.

By having a
more inclusive model of priesthood, helps us to understand God in a wider more
inclusive way, as Mother as well as Father, as birthing and nurturing, It
changes our image of God. That doesn't mean that we are changing God. Rather we
are recognizing all the aspects of God.

An inclusive
model of priesthood seems to be more authentic to Christ's message. Jesus
welcomed everyone. He chose women and men as disciples. He chose Mary Magdalen
as the apostle to the apostles. Jesus called sinners and saints. He forgave
sinners. The inclusive model of church doesn't have a hierarchical structure. It
doesn't value symbols of power and wealth.

An inclusive
model of priesthood is committed to following conscience and obeying the
promptings of the Holy Spirit.

An inclusive
model of priesthood has it's challenges though, how to reconcile these
differences with the wider Church, should the Church ever accept women as
priests. It makes it harder, yet how could women priests exclude these other
groups if they themselves want to be included?

The Church in
Inter Insigniores, 1976, says that women with their female bodies can not image
Christ and therefore they can not be priests. But after the tragedy in Newtown,
Connecticut, Cardinal Timothy Dolan eulogized one of the teachers, Anne Marie
Murphy, and described how Christ-like she was to give her life to protect her
students. So women can
image Christ. I think that
imaging Christ means living and loving and serving like Christ did, not
something so superficial as what body parts you happened to be born with.

The Catholic
church does not accept LGBT people. But they are all God's children. Their love
and commitment to each other is a sign and witness of God's love for each other
and to the christian community. So by including LGBT people, it makes it harder
for the Church to accept an inclusive priesthood.

Accepting
divorced and remarried people is another challenge. The Church upholds marriage
no matter what, abusive or not. So anyone who divorces and remarries is
considered as living in sin and is not allowed to receive communion. Because an
inclusive priesthood allows them to receive communion, this would be a challenge
to be reconciled..

There are
some things that an inclusive priesthood sees as challenges in the Church..
These are differences between the church and and inclusive priesthood. An
inclusive priesthood is not hierarchical, is not necessarily celibate, does not
vow obedience to a Bishop, but to the Holy Spirit and their conscience.
Inclusive priesthood practices simplicity and does not look for signs of power
and wealth. It is hard to justify expensive gold altar appointments and brocade
vestments when they are serving the poor and marginalized people.

And then
there is inclusive language which offers contributions as well as challenges.
The inclusive priesthood uses very inclusive language, Where God is acknowledged
as Father and Mother, and words of power like King and Lord and rewritten to
more equal terms. The advantage of this is to be more open and inclusive of
women and all people. The Catholic Church has been working on inclusive language
since the 1970s, but moving rather slowly. And recently, some of the advances
have been rescinded. The Church struggles with changing language and still being
doctrinally correct. Regardless, some of the translations are just awkward.
There is no easy gender-neutral Mother-Father word in English. Something like
“Our Progenitor, who art in heaven...” just doesn't sound right.

I look at the
Catholic Church and inclusive model of priesthood, and wonder if Jesus showed up
today, where would he feel the most comfortable? I would like to think that he'd
feel more at home with the inclusive priesthood model of church because it is
more open and welcoming to everyone. It portrays the church more as it was in
the first centuries, before the church made rules about excluding women and
celibate priesthood, before the church amassed power and wealth.

Dec 28, 2012 4:45 AM EST "Father Piero Corsi sparked outrage in Italy with his Christmas Eve comments about the growing number of women killed in domestic disputes. It's no surprise that misogyny appears to be alive and well in certain corners of
Catholic Italy, where women are hardly
viewed as men’s equals. But in the town of Lerici, near Turin, parish priest
Father Piero Corsi sparked unprecedented outrage this Christmas, when he chose
the
delicate issue of femicide, or the killing of women in domestic disputes, as
his Christmas bulletin theme."

"In April 1976, the Pontifical Biblical Commission released a study examining the exclusion of women from the ministerial priesthood from a biblical perspective... In the conclusion of the document, they write:"It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.However, some think that in the scriptures there are sufficient indications to exclude this possibility, considering that the sacraments of eucharist and reconciliation have a special link with the person of Christ and therefore with the male hierarchy, as borne out by the New Testament.Others, on the contrary, wonder if the church hierarchy, entrusted with the sacramental economy, would be able to entrust the ministries of eucharist and reconciliation to women in light of circumstances, without going against Christ's original intentions."[6]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_doctrine_on_the_ordination_of_women

So let us be clear the Vatican scholars in the Pontifical Biblical Commission of 1976 is open to the possibility of women priests. The Catechism and the current papal teaching contradict its own scholarship.
The church must always follow Jesus' example.

First, Jesus did not ordain anyone at the last supper. Second, according to all four Gospels, the Risen Christ appeared first to Mary of Magdala, and chose her to the apostle to the apostles to proclaim the central message of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Third: In the Gospels, Jesus treated women and men as disciples and equals.Read Luke 8:1-3. Many women were disciples of Jesus and they supported him by bankrolling his ministry!Fourth: According to scholars such as Gary Macy, in The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, women were ordained for the first thousand years of church history. Archaeologist Dorothy Irvin has found many examples of women deacons, priests and bishops in the ancient world in mosaics, frescoes, and tombstones in Rome and the Near East and Northern Africa. Pope Gelasius in 494 chastised the bishops of southern Italy for allowing women to preside at Eucharist. Bishop Atto in the tenth century referred to the presence of women priests in the history of the church.

Fifth: It is time for the Catholic Church to follow the example of Jesus and the early church, and affirm women priests. The quote from the Catholic Church's Catechism that claims a male priesthood is Jesus' will contradicts the evidence in the bible and the archaeological evidence of women deacons, priests and bishops found in the early Christianity. Women are equal images of God and sexism is a sin that denies women the opportunity to serve as equals in the sacramental ministry of our church.

Roman Catholic Women Priests are offering the gift of a renewed priestly ministry in an inclusive church where all are welcome to receive sacraments. The full equality of women is the voice of God in our time. Dr. Bridget Mary Meehan, ARCWPAssociation of Roman Catholic Women Priestswww.arcwp.org

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

"When my friend Robin was dying, she asked me if I knew a priest she could talk to who would not be, as she put it, “too judgmental.” I knew the perfect man, a friend of our family, a priest conjured up out of an old black-and-white movie, the type who seemed not to exist anymore in a Catholic Church roiled by scandal. Like Father Chuck O’Malley, the New York inner-city priest played by Bing Crosby, Father Kevin O’Neil sings like an angel and plays the piano; he’s handsome, kind and funny. Most important, he has a gift. He can lighten the darkness around the dying and those close to them. When he held my unconscious brother’s hand in the hospital, the doctors were amazed that Michael’s blood pressure would noticeably drop. The only problem was Father Kevin’s reluctance to minister to the dying. It tears at him too much. He did it, though, and he and Robin became quite close. Years later, he still keeps a picture of her in his office. As we’ve seen during this tear-soaked Christmas, death takes no holiday. I asked Father Kevin, who feels the subject so deeply, if he could offer a meditation. This is what he wrote:

How does one celebrate Christmas with the fresh memory of 20 children and 7 adults ruthlessly murdered in Newtown; with the searing image from Webster of firemen rushing to save lives ensnared in a burning house by a maniac who wrote that his favorite activity was “killing people”? How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives? The killings on the cusp of Christmas in quiet, little East Coast towns stirred a 30-year-old memory from my first months as a priest in parish ministry in Boston. I was awakened during the night and called to Brigham and Women’s Hospital because a girl of 3 had died. The family was from Peru. My Spanish was passable at best. When I arrived, the little girl’s mother was holding her lifeless body and family members encircled her.They looked to me as I entered. Truth be told, it was the last place I wanted to be. To parents who had just lost their child, I didn’t have any words, in English or Spanish, that wouldn’t seem cheap, empty. But I stayed. I prayed. I sat with them until after sunrise, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking, to let them know that they were not alone in their suffering and grief. The question in their hearts then, as it is in so many hearts these days, is “Why?” The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger. I remember visiting a dear friend hours before her death and reminding her that death is not the end, that we believe in the Resurrection. I asked her, “Are you there yet?” She replied, “I go back and forth.”

There was nothing I wanted more than to bring out a bag of proof and say, “See? You can be absolutely confident now.” But there is no absolute bag of proof. I just stayed with her. A life of faith is often lived “back and forth” by believers and those who minister to them. Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago. I believe differently now than 30 years ago. First, I do not expect to have all the answers, nor do I believe that people are really looking for them. Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil. I don’t expect comfort to come from afar. I really do believe that God enters the world through us. And even though I still have the “Why?” questions, they are not so much “Why, God?” questions. We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not. One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be God’s presence. When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh. They couldn’t explain why he died. Even if they could, it wouldn’t have brought him back. Yet the many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. They held me up to preach at Brian’s funeral. They consoled me as I tried to comfort others. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong.

A contemporary theologian has described mercy as “entering into the chaos of another.” Christmas is really a celebration of the mercy of God who entered the chaos of our world in the person of Jesus, mercy incarnate. I have never found it easy to be with people who suffer, to enter into the chaos of others. Yet, every time I have done so, it has been a gift to me, better than the wrapped and ribboned packages. I am pulled out of myself to be love’s presence to someone else, even as they are love’s presence to me. I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily. A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 26, 2012, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Why, God?.

Monday, December 24, 2012

"Pope
Benedict XVI yesterday, just three days before Christmas, pardoned his former
butler, Paolo Gabriele, who was serving an 18-month jail sentence for stealing
confidential Vatican documents and handing them over to a journalist for
publication, resulting in the "Vatileaks" scandal.

The Pope yesterday
morning visited Gabriele personally in his Vatican cell to inform him of the
decision, the Vatican said in a statement. (Photo: This photo from the
Osservatore Romano, is the only photo of the meeting the Vatican will
be releasing.) The Vatican's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the
two had a "very intense" conversation for about 15 minutes, privately and
alone.

On October 6, a Vatican tribunal, after a brief trial, found
Gabriele guilty of removing and/or photocopying dozens of the Pope's private
documents and leaking them to Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published
them in May.

Gabriele said in his testimony that he acted out of love for
the Church. He said he had taken the documents in order to "jar" the Vatican in
some way, in order to force top officials -- and eventually the Pope himself --
to face more directly a number of cases where special agendas seemed to be
placing private or partial interests ahead of the interests of the Universal
Church. In this sense, Gabriele saw himself as a "whistleblower," not as the
agent of any group, in or out of the Church, seeking to harm the Church. The
Vatican tribunal judges said in their sentence that they believed Gabriele's
description of his motivation, and for this reason reduced his sentence from 3
years to a year and a half.

Now Gabriele is
free.

"This morning the Holy Father Benedict XVI visited Paolo Gabriele
in prison in order to confirm his forgiveness and to inform him personally of
his acceptance of Mr Gabriele's request for pardon," the Vatican statement
said.

In November the court convicted a computer expert, Claudio
Sciarpelletti, of helping Gabriele leak the papal documents. Sciarpelletti, who
pleaded innocent, was found guilty and given a suspended sentence of two months.
He is already back at work in his old job, and a full pardon is also expected
soon for him, Father Lombardi said.

What has not been made clear is
whether the "Vatileaks" case is now completely closed, or not.

A
few days ago, Pope Benedict, unexpectedly, received in audience three cardinals
-- the Spaniard Julian Herranz, the Slovak Josef Tomko and the Italian Salvatore
De Giorgi -- who comprise the special "cardinals' commission" the Pope himself
set up to investigate the "Vatileaks" case, alongside the investigation of the
Vatican court and the Vatican police department.

It is said in Rome that the
three cardinals continued to gather testimony and evidence about the case even
after Gabriele's trial and sentencing in October. This suggests that perhaps
there is still an ongoing investigation. But what this investigation (if it is
continuing) consists of, why it might be continuing, and what it might lead to
(if anything), is not clear."

..."The two women, along with two others, Beth O'Brien and Sister Lynn Lisbeth, are connected to Wisdom's Well, an interfaith spirituality center in Madison. All four women ran afoul of Morlino for allegedly straying too far from Catholic doctrine.In a Nov. 27 memo to priests leaked to the State Journal, Morlino told priests the four women are not to be allowed to preach, lead prayers, hold workshops or provide spiritual guidance of any kind on parish property in the 11-county Madison Diocese.The memo does not cite any examples of things the women may have said that contradict Catholic doctrine. Rather, it says "grave concern exists" with regard to the "teachings and animating spirit of the center." Namely, that its members "may espouse certain views flowing" from movements such as "New Ageism" and "indifferentism."

Indifferentism is defined in an addendum to the memo as "the belief that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another." In the Catholic Church, indifferentism is heresy, first condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in the 1800s.The memo says the grave concerns "are evidenced mainly from (Wisdom's Well's) website." It quotes numerous passages on the website that concern the diocese, including an invitation to women "who wish to create a community for exploring and practicing the wisdom and compassion of the divine feminine."Morlino's memo posted onlineThe diocese initially declined to comment on the issue, saying the confidential memo was intended to remain that way "to respectfully protect the reputations of all those involved."After the State Journal published an article on the memo two weeks ago, the diocese posted the memo and the addendum on its website so parishioners and others could read them in their entirety. The documents can be found at madisondiocese.org."